Drink problems at Soviet schools

Press, 24 October 1984, Page 21

Drink problems at Soviet schools

NZPA-Reuter Moscow Conditions in schools in Soviet Kazakhstan are so lax that many students, along with their teachers, get drunk and have to be taken to detoxification centres, according to the central Asian republic’s Communist Party chief. In a speech to the Kazakh party’s central committee, Mr Dinmukhammed Kunayev said there were serious shortcomings in the way children were educated. He said that in one small region in the last six months 560 senior schoolchildren and technical college students, along with <35 of tutors, teachers 1 ' and

masters stayed at the sober-ing-up station. Mr Kunayev’s speech was printed by the republic’s daily, “Kazakhstanskaya Pravda.” The Soviet police run special stations where drunks are locked up for the night and then charged a fee the next morning. Mr Kunayev, a member of the country’s ruling politburo, said the republic’s young communist organisation, Komsomol, was poorly organised and that teenagers were being led astray, He said many dressed in Western fashions and danced at “ideologically and aesthetically dubious”, discotheques.